Feds: States Have No Rights

by Chuck Baldwin

In a recent column appearing on InfoWars.com, Kurt Nimmo succinctly and correctly pointed out that the federal government’s usurpation of State sovereignty, jurisdiction, and authority is worsening. The current case in point is the recent open letter to all firearms dealers by the ATF. Nimmo begins, “In its continuing effort to pare down the number of Americans who can exercise their rights under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has sent a letter to firearms dealers informing them that medical patients ‘addicted’ to legally dispensed medical marijuana have no right to own and possess firearms.

“According to Arthur Herbert, Assistant Director of Enforcement Programs and Services at the ATF, ‘any person who uses or is addicted to marijuana, regardless of whether his or her State has passed legislation authorizing marijuana use of medicinal purposes, is an unlawful user or addicted to a controlled substance, and is prohibited by Federal law from possessing firearms or ammunition’ and will be compelled to admit the prescribed use of medical marijuana on ATF forms at the point of purchase.”

Nimmo goes on to point out, “More significantly, the ATF’s move to deny cancer and other patients medical marijuana is part of a larger attempt to roll back the Second Amendment by color of law and also attack states’ rights as guaranteed by the Tenth Amendment.”

And it’s not just medical marijuana and cancer patients that the ATF–and its water boys in Congress–wants to deny Second Amendment rights to. As has been previously reported, many of our nation’s veterans are also on the “hit list” as not eligible to keep and bear arms.

See the report at:

http://gunowners.org/a091207.htm

Beyond that, any person who has been diagnosed with a “mental disorder” is also in the cross hairs for having their Second Amendment rights expunged. And, of course, “mental disorder” could include anyone from a returning combat veteran who suffers from “post-traumatic stress disorder,” or “combat fatigue,” to someone who was prescribed medication for Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) as a child, to someone who was diagnosed as suffering from bipolar disorder. In other words, the federal government wants the power to classify just about anyone it wants to as having a “mental disorder” and, therefore, be denied their right to keep and bear arms.

But there is even more. Nimmo writes, “In 2009, Democrat and notorious gun-grabber Rep. Carolyn McCarthy introduced The No Fly, No Buy Act (H.R. 2401), a bill that would have merged the TSA’s no-fly list with the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), a point-of-sale system for determining eligibility to purchase a firearm.

“The current mayor of Chicago–the largest anti-Second Amendment city in the country after New York City–and former Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel proposed that anybody on the fed’s no-fly list (numbering in the tens of thousands) should have their Second Amendment stripped.”

Of course, if having one’s name on the no-fly list makes one a terrorist, why wasn’t former senator Ted Kennedy so identified? It is a matter of public record that he was detained several times by TSA agents, because his name kept showing up on the no-fly list.

Nimmo concludes his column by saying, “The feds are determined to whittle away at the Second Amendment and this under-handed effort to make gun dealers responsible for determining if their customers are marijuana ‘addicts’–under penalty of losing their licenses–is part of the long term plan to disarm the American people.”

See Nimmo’s column at:

http://tinyurl.com/6ggsabg

This draconian decision by the ATF hits people in my home State of Montana especially hard. Under the laws of the State of Montana, a person is lawfully allowed to receive prescribed amounts of medical marijuana for legitimate health reasons (I know many of these people personally). And contrary to what anyone inside the Beltway says, marijuana in medicinal amounts has been proven to greatly assist people who suffer from a variety of maladies. Furthermore, the misuse of alcohol–which is also known to help treat a variety of illnesses in medicinal amounts, which even the Holy Scripture collaborates in I Timothy 5:23–inflicts far greater havoc upon both the individual user and society in general than marijuana has or could ever inflict.

It is also true that the so-called “war on drugs” by the federal government is not only an abject failure, it has become a tool by which power-hungry despot-wannabes strip hundreds of thousands of harmless, peaceful Americans of their freedoms and liberties. There are tens of thousands of people languishing behind prison walls that have never harmed a single person, have never stolen, have never committed an act of violence, or have never even shown the slightest aggression toward a fellow human being. They languish for decades and even for a lifetime in harsh prison conditions because of this never-ending, always escalating “war on drugs.”

Talk about a financial cost to taxpayers: the cost of incarcerating tens and hundreds of thousands of harmless, nonviolent drug users–not to mention the cost of investigating, arresting, arraigning, and trying them–literally dwarfs whatever the cost would be to let them live peacefully in society, or even to allow churches and special-needs ministries and hospitals to treat them.

But a few things the “war on drugs” does accomplish is it serves as a major reason to increase federal funding for all kinds of Gestapo-like tactics at every level of government; it provides justification for governmental restrictions of civil liberties; and it is a major excuse for the exponential growth of the emerging police state. And dare I even mention the fact that it is now absolutely certain that persons (at the highest levels) and agencies within the federal government have been (and are) reaping gargantuan profits via illegal drug trafficking. As one retired federal agent (that’s right, federal agent) who was personally involved in the feds’ “war on drugs” for decades personally told me, “Chuck, the federal government hates competition.” (I’m not making it up; that’s what he said.) Oh yes! It also allows the ATF to deny Second Amendment rights to more and more people!

America desperately needs State governors to draw a line in the sand against this federal leviathan for the protection of the liberties and freedoms of the citizens within his or her State! Let me say it bluntly: we desperately need a State governors to tell the feds to go to Hades! If State leaders would stop cooperating with and submitting to these would-be tyrants, I am convinced the people of the states would rally behind them in record numbers and speed! I am absolutely convinced that this would be the case in the Mountain States anyway. And when the feds attempt to withhold federal tax dollars from these courageous, albeit recalcitrant states, it needs to be remembered that the states can do likewise. They can withhold tax revenues from the feds: two can play that game! All it would take would be a plucky governor with enough backbone to do it!

In the meantime, combat veterans, people who have taken certain prescription drugs, people who have shown up on no-fly lists, and now people who have been lawfully issued a particular medical card can be denied their right to keep and bear arms by the US government. When will the American people ever have enough?

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(c) Chuck Baldwin